ABSTRACT
In 1836, hundreds of workers organized a "turn-out" to protest wage cuts and rent hikes. It was one of the first strikes in US history. Starting in the 1840s, at the time of the potato famine in Ireland, a half-million Irish immigrants arrived in America almost penniless, packed into sailing ships under the most vile conditions. There was little improvement upon arrival, as many thousands were herded into freight cars to Pennsylvania mines to replace English-speaking workers at a much lower wage. Thousands of mine workers, about a quarter of them children, faced constant danger like the loss of hands or feet or fingers, collapsing walls, or bodies crushed by rail cars. Workers had initially been evicted from company-owned shacks, and when that failed to end the strike, management hired gunmen to attack the tent colony. The "company town" of George Pullman had been an experiment in social engineering — or social control.
